Quotessence
Home / Authors / Paul Monette
Paul Monette

Paul Monette Quotes

Author

Filter quotes by topic

AllDeathAidsDyingGriefLossLoveSummerWorldAngerBittersweet EndingsEnd Of SummerGayHateHealHurtIfsLeftMenQueerRage

Famous Paul Monette Quotes

“I don't trust my own answers anymore. I'm too twisted up with rage, too hooked in the millennium. But I find myself combing the past these days, dreaming dreams without sleep, puzzling over any guys, the gay and the straight and the inbetween. Somewhere in there is a horror of love, and to try to kill the beast in them, they take it out on us. Which is not to say I don't chastise myself for halving the world into us and tbem. I know that the good guys aren't all gay, or the bad all straight. That is what I am sifting for, to know what a man is finally, no matter the tribe or gender.”

DeathDyingAngerRageAids
Book:Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story
Create image

“I don't come from the past, I come from now, here in the cauldron of plague. When the doors to the camps were finally beaten down, the Jews of Europe no longer came from Poland and Holland and France. They came from Auschwitz and Buchenwald. But I will never understand how the straights could have let us die like this - year after year after year, collaborating by indifference - except by sifting through the evidence of my queer journey.”

DeathDyingAidsQueer
Book:Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story
Create image

“But I also understand why Steve, who'd sewn his share of panels over the years, would fly into a rage as the end approached: 'And don't put me in that fucking quilt!' Being of a mind to have his body dumped instead on the White House lawn. The guilt had begun to seem too passive, even too nice, letting the war criminals off the hook and providing the media with far too easy a wrap up. Much neater than trying to unravel the Gordian knot of AIDS activism, the Byzantine infighting and turf protection, the in-your-face bad manners of those who wouldn't go quietly. The quilted dead made for prettier sound bites, especially effective at zeroing in on the "innocent" victims, the kids and the hemophiliacs. At the same time there began to appear a certain overview phenomenon under the general rubric of AIDS-and-the-Arts. Typically these were hand-wringing accounts of the impact of so much cultured dying, lamenting for instance the White Way silence left by Michael Bennett, the songs unsung. This litany was something of a mixed bag, bringing under the same umbrella the likes of Way Bandy and Halston, Miss Kitty and Keith Haring. Though it was surely true what Fran Lebowitz so scathingly observed If you removed all of the homosexuals and homosexual influence from what is generally regarded as American culture, you would be pretty much left with 'Let's Make a Deal.' these roundups of the arts tended to foster in the general populace ever new heights of Not me.”

DeathCultureDyingAngerAidsQueer
Book:Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise
Create image